Palm hit by patent suit Mon Nov 6, 2006 3:28pm ET30 NEW YORK (Reuters) - Patent holding company NTP Inc. said on Monday it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Palm Inc.(PALM.O: Quote, Profile, Research), maker of the Treo mobile phone, in a U.S. court, sending Palm shares down more than 7 percent. The suit alleges that Palm's products and services infringed NTP's patents and seeks recovery of monetary damages resulting from Palm's direct and indirect infringement, the intellectual property firm said in a statement. Specifically, NTP said it is targeting services and systems primarily used or adapted for use in e-mail systems with radio frequency communications to mobile processors and related services. A Palm spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. NTP said it would prefer to resolve the issue via a negotiated license agreement. NTP is best known for its battle with BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd (RIM.TO: Quote, Profile, Research), which agreed in May to pay $612.5 million to NTP to settle a damaging and drawn-out patent infringement fight. Shares of Palm fell 8.1 percent, or $1.24, to $14.17 in afternoon trade on Nasdaq. http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...8Z_01_N06282003_RTRUKOC_0_US-PALM.xml&src=rss
Now here's Palm's public response to the lawsuit: "The NTP lawsuit claims that certain Palm products infringe seven NTP patents. All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm. Palm has been in occasional contact with NTP concerning a license to these patents. When Palm last communicated with NTP many months ago, however, each of the patents already was the subject of re-examination proceedings by the PTO. Palm is disappointed that, after many months of silence and repeated rejections of NTP's claims by the PTO, NTP has chosen to sue on patents of doubtful validity. Palm respects legitimate intellectual property rights, but will defend itself vigorously against the attempted misuse of the patent and judicial systems to extract monetary value for rights to patents that may ultimately have no value at all." http://mytreo.net/archives/2006/11/palm-comments-publicly-on-ntp-lawsuit.html
Greedy Patent Holding companies, I swear. They smell blood from the RIM ordeal now they're after Palm to pony up some dough next they'll be coming after MS and the rest. I swear code and methods should never be allowed patents, just copyrights for licensing because this is sadly ridiculous.
Boy NTP sure seems like it wants to sue everyone to get money, I agree I hope Palm counter sues them.
Maybe they aren't doing good financially and need to sue anyone they can to see how much quick cash they can get. Look how much they stole from BlackBerry! was it $612 million or something like that? This time, NTP doesn't have a leg to stand on. Palm doesn't make email/messaging wireless software. The messaging app that comes on the Treos is built by someone else. I don't know what they're smoking. So I guess now anyone who makes an email application that works on mobile wireless devices is infringing NTP patents? What do they think, they invented e-mail and the internet? Who's next, Microsoft Pocket Outlook? They better stop dreaming.
Maybe they will try to sue Microsoft for their email applications and claim they stole the patents from them. It would be something to see them try to go after Microsoft.
Why stop at MS, they could sue Apple too! NTP could claim that using email over WiFi is a mobile app.
